Michael Gorman’s “Web 2.0: The Sleep of Reason” gets it completely right, and I’ve got nothing substantive to add to his first post in this forum. For anyone who’s read Gorman’s essay, the work of Nicholas Carr, or my new book The Cult of the Amateur, it’s obvious that Web 2.0 is a cultural and intellectual catastrophe that will provoke mass media illiteracy in America.

So, what to do?

The challenge now is political. It’s to build a coalition of people philosophically opposed to the corrosive ideas in Web 2.0. This is a sales and marketing job. We’ve got to reach leaders in education, business, politics, media and the arts who care about the future of our culture.

The only way to efficaciously fight back against the radical democratizers is by exposing Web 2.0 to serious public scutiny. People outside Silicon Valley get it when they are exposed to the Web 2.0 nonsense. Teachers, politicians, business leaders, editors, librarians, broadcasters, and, above all, parents are aware of Web 2.0′s destructive consequences. We need more books and articles about the crisis of authoritative media, more forums like this one at the Britannica Blog. We need to force this issue onto the national political agenda.

As Gorman explains, the intellectual life of our society is at stake. This is a critically serious debate that will determine the credibility and the very viability of our information economy. If we want our kids to be ignorant, then accept the fashionable inanities of Web 2.0. If not, join the cause. And fight against the flattening of our culture into a wasteland of collectivist nonsense.